Friday, March 30, 2012

On the Failure of Post-Normal Science

The Climate Etc. site has an article on the "Republican brain" (apparently a recent but fast-growing field of science), to which I respond here:

The larger problem is, when nobody has all the answers even to the most basic questions, instead of admitting they don't know, the self-styled institutional "experts" dig in and defend their "expertness", and fight, rather than disdaining such adolescent and misdirected behavior in favor of finding the objective truth--in fact, "objective" is the key word.

None of the opinions Judith Curry has sought out and brought forward here are worth any of my time, none at all. They are all subjective, not objective. And I am not talking about their political opinions--much less their opinions on one political group over another--which by definition are irrelevant to science. I am talking about their presumptions about "settled/good" science. None of them know what they are talking about. They just don't know what they are talking about.

Let's cut through all the BS, all the vain arguments--we live in a time of crisis in science, because the reigning scientific paradigm, or philosophy, (undirected evolution) has failed, becoming a millstone dragging down the mind rather than a light to the truth, and those who mentally depend upon that paradigm, as a religious belief, do not yet know that their "knowledge" is obsolete, just so much roadkill on the journey to more real knowledge. There are as yet no coherent societal constructs, no easy public narratives--in short, no enlightened public opinion (a.k.a. "post-normal science")--to replace the already-failed belief, in essentially meaningless development (the literal meaning of "undirected evolution") of all the miracles of natural process, of natural mechanism, we observe in the world and the universe beyond. There are only other religions, which the "scientific believers" prefer to war with, rather than see that their own position has become just another benighted religion. Darwin was a religious-minded, amateur scientist, an incompetent fool, whose fundamental misapprehension, concerning design of the natural world, has spawned a world of scientific fools--and their time is now passing, along with that misapprehension. Will that passing consume another century, of increasingly misdirected science?

Judith Curry's blog (and every other blog, filled with earnest argument and unending discussion) is just a continuing therapy session for those who cannot or will not learn. Judith Curry, like every other academic or institutional scientific authority, does not know where to turn. And that is telling, because she "knows", as a scientist, that only objective observation, interpretation and verification are needed--not reliance upon unquestioned dogma, even if that dogma is "scientific" (i.e., "settled science"). All of the people whose opinions she solicits believe unquestioningly in evolution theory. But that theory is fundamentally false, mistaking designed mechanisms for products of undirected, natural laws. Even the discovery and elucidation of the amazing mechanism that is the DNA molecule, has not broken through the false belief, to a realization of underlying, deliberate design of all the life on Earth.

And more specifically, in the climate debates, if the climate system is not designed, then it must be subject to "runaway", chaotic behavior, QED--for (and here is the fundamental truth, believe it or not) there is no coherent physical mechanism, indeed no physical coherence, without deliberate design. Scientists study design every day, throughout their lives, yet shackle themselves to the lie that everything is the result of random physical processes--and no more. The dissociation with reality is so great today, that many entertain pseudoscientific discussions of, say, the "Republican brain", in the vain hope of surcease from their inner struggle to deny the obvious design in the natural world, with concocted outer struggles against phantoms of their imagination. Such discussions are, in my opinion, insane, inherently damaging to true, verifiable reason.